1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the art of job processing in a printing system. The present invention finds application where the input in a printing, copying or faxing job includes images or pages that are unwanted in the output of the job. For example, the present invention finds application where the input to a job contains blank pages, or separator pages containing, for example, a logo, wherein the blank or logo bearing pages are not desired in the output of the job.
2. Description of Related Art
When handling and processing paper documents, such as, for example, reports and memos in an office environment, it is often too time consuming to concern oneself with paper conservation. For example, sometimes documents contain blank pages. For instance, a first portion of a document is printed from a file containing an extra form feed command and the pages are quickly gathered from an output tray of a printer and collated with a second portion of the document. The collated document is then copied many times. Each copy including the blank page. Alternatively, blank pages are intentionally inserted in a document as a means to separate sections of the document. Subsequent copies or faxings of the document do not require the separator pages. Nevertheless the separator pages are inadvertently duplicated. When copying or faxing a document that contains a blank page, the cost of copying or faxing the blank page may be inconsequential when compared to the time that would have to be spent searching for and removing the blank page from a set of pages being faxed or copied. Additionally, such search and remove operations, in a rushed and crowded office environment, are preformed at the risk of dropping and damaging and/or un-collating the document. Therefore, people involved in paper document reproduction often opt for the faster and safer practice of copying and faxing complete packets of papers, whether or not the packets include wasteful blank pages. Nevertheless, the practice is wasteful in many ways, including material, time, energy, and equipment wear. While the waste maybe minimal in any one instance, the aggregate waste, across time, and around the world, is significant.
Readily available printing systems, such as, for example, facsimile machines, personal computers, printers, copiers, and more sophisticated document processors, do not provide any assistance in eliminating this waste. As the impact our activities have on our environment becomes more apparent, there is a desire to minimizing that impact, if not where ever possible, at least where ever practical.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide, in a printing system, an inexpensive, fast, and automatic method for finding blank and undesired images or pages in an input document and excluding the undesired elements from a document output.